Doubting Toward Faith: The Journey to Confident Christianity

University

Chapter 1

A CRISIS OF DOUBT

For those with faith, no explanation is necessary. For those without, no explanation is possible.

THOMAS AQUINAS

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

This is a book about doubt. Beyond surpassing wonder about God or mere inquiry about Him and His truth, doubt digs much deeper. Doubt doesn’t just ask, What is real? It poses the challenge, "Is my faith real?" Is what I believe really valid? Or is it simply a modified myth, an uber-marketed religious fairy tale supported by millions of gullible minds throughout history?

Doubt trumps wondering, and it body-slams mere curiosity. In its worst form, it goes beyond simply searching for answers to questions, inevitably denying the legitimacy of the questions themselves.

For Christians, doubt can either serve us or sink us. It can drive us to seek truth or it can drown us in despair, hopelessness, and confusion. If ignored or left unchecked, it can bore into our brain, releasing a virus of unbelief, infecting and eventually destroying every healthy thought about God. It can take us to the place where nothing else matters. Where we find ourselves loathing even life itself.

If left unchecked, intellectual doubt metastasizes, seeping its way into our emotions and collecting a wide array of fears, worries, anxieties, anger, confusion, depression, and ultimately despair at the thought of being played or duped or envisioning a life without our once cherished belief in God.

A World in Transition

That’s why I wrote this book—to keep you from ever getting to that breaking point or to help you if you’re already there. I’m going to show you how to look your doubts squarely in the eyes and stare them down. Together, we’ll examine the sources, causes, and kinds of doubts. You may ask, Do we really need a whole book on doubt? Is this really a huge issue in the church today? In a word, yes, it really is. It’s a bigger issue than most Christians realize.

Capturing the zeitgeist of our changing times is quite the project. We live in a multitextured culture that is replete with innumerable beliefs, opinions, ideas, and life philosophies. Ours is a culture of doubt and longing, faith and questioning, searching and probing. And much of the doubt has been accelerated by fast-paced change. Our culture is living between the tension of what we once were and what we are now becoming. And for many, waiting in the blank space between the definition of what we were and the search to define what we are becoming feels for the moment confusing, and even a bit uncomfortable.

Echoing this angst, Os Guinness writes, We live in an age of doubt, disillusion and disaffiliation, which naturally prizes what has been described as ‘the faith that you go to when you don’t know where to go.’ ¹ Both our pluralistic and secularized culture has produced a fragilized-self as it pertains to doubt.² We’ve shifted from Christianity to Anyanity (pluralism) or Noanity (atheism).

Belief isn’t nearly as comfortable and cozy as it once seemed. There’s an irritant to it; like a pebble in a shoe, these competing beliefs have made the faith walk a little less comfortable. Today, record numbers of those who once professed faith in Christ are walking away from the church, even limping, in the name of doubt. I believe the church is more threatened by doubt today than at any time in her two thousand years of existence.

External Threats

Our faith faces threats from the outside. Many New Atheists have sought to supplant belief in transcendence altogether. Number one on the agenda is an attempt to jettison God once and for all. Age-old questions are being repackaged, setting off alarms in the hearts of many believers. Publications from these fundamentalist atheist writers work in unison, raining a downpour of doubt on believers and unbelievers alike. Books such as Richard Dawkins’s highly acclaimed The God Delusion, or Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, or Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, or the late Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything have created for many an insurmountable mountain of doubt, causing some believers to secretly ask, Could this universe be all there is?

These New Atheists are determined to create unbelief in believers, even employing the use of billboards that read, Millions of people are happy without God, are you? To many atheists, perhaps God was a useful fiction to serve those on the evolutionary trajectory toward a more modern age of scientific enlightenment. But now that we are enlightened, the time has come, once and for all, to bury heaven’s so-called architect—God. We are the architects.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s famed God is dead mantra is still widely circulated, but so is this inescapable, inner-inkling whereby much of mankind still wonders if there is something or Someone beyond the universe—something even transcendent. Something like… God. So, the tables can be turned. Even the honest atheist has his moments where he asks himself, "Could I be wrong? Does… He exist?"

It turns out that neither belief nor unbelief comes easy in a world as eclectic as this place we call home. Nevertheless, many atheists, and especially the New Atheists, seek to bury their what if questions, holding fast to their predetermined commitment to materialism.

Now to be fair, atheists aren’t alone in their attempt to bury God. Others outside of atheism have joined the campaign to end Christian belief. Those like New York Times bestselling author Bart Ehrman have contributed to this onslaught of doubt through the release of books such as How Jesus Became God; Misquoting Jesus; and Jesus, Interrupted. Further, the Muslim Reza Aslan and his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth heighten this mountain of doubt among some believers. Adding to this confusion are bloggers who pollute the blogosphere with just enough information to be dangerous. Their empty rhetoric somehow manages to mislead ill-equipped Christians, casting them over the cliff and into the sea of doubt.

Joining this doubt parade is a high-speed moral devolution. Once held values have slipped down the slope into degradation. Here’s how this works. Ours was once a culture that rejected same-sex marriage. It then tolerated the idea. Then accepted it. Now it not only celebrates same-sex marriage, it rejects those who see marriage any other way. This creates great cultural confusion.

Some Christians privately wonder, Is morality relative after all? But as Flannery O’Connor would remind us, Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. Cultures morally devolve as they slide down the moral slope in fivefold fashion from rejection, to tolerance, to acceptance, to celebration, and to rejecting the opposite of the very thing they once rejected. Many regard this as cultural progression rather than regression. This creates confusion and doubt.

This moral devolution is traveling at high speed. To prove my point above, state by state, same-sex marriage is being condoned and legalized. By the release date of this book, the Supreme Court will have met again to discuss the national legalization of same-sex marriage, and it’s quite possible the verdict as you read this book has already been declared—Same-sex marriage is now legal in all fifty states.

The culture is changing with such rapidity that some of my statements in this chapter are probably in need of a little freshening up. Books designed for school-age children with titles like Jacob’s New Dress or When Kayla Was Kyle or Heather Has Two Mommies have joined the fight to cast doubt on biblical truths, values, and morals.

The gender issue is in such a confused state that some are posing the question, What’s your PGP? (Your preferred gender pronoun.) Some even advocate caution when using the pronouns he and she because that may not be someone’s PGP. California became the first state to allow transgender kids K-12 to pick the bathroom of their preferred gender. In the same state, these students are also allowed to pick which sports teams to play on—the boys’ or the girls’.

Adding to the sweeping change, marijuana’s legalization is quickly gaining ground. Normalizing what was once forbidden is now old news. And if you don’t join the party quickly, you just might taste a little condemnation yourself. The speed at which the culture is changing morally is almost too fast for the church to even process. And as a result, some Christians sadly ask, "Is our God out of touch? Outdated? Does our faith work in today’s world?"

Some are ready to repackage God, claiming, It’s time to renovate God or remove Him altogether. Even some pastors and writers have sought to give God a facelift, making Him more hip, accessible, and viable for a new generation. New times require a new God. And by freshening Him up a bit, doubting Christians hope to quiet their doubts. Or at least ease them.

Add to all these external voices the part that multiculturalism plays. Concerning belief, globalization offers a lot of live options. The world is getting smaller, and any number of beliefs are moving in next door, casting a shadow of doubt on the long-cherished view that Jesus is the only way to heaven. Today, pluralism along with secularism reigns supreme, even in many professing believers’ hearts. It is becoming harder and harder for Christians to stand united against a chorus of voices crying out against Jesus and His claims. There are even more external threats out there, but I trust you’ve caught my vibe.

Internal Threats

The church is also threatened from within. Many in the church are twisting Scripture to placate the prevailing culture on topics such as hell, homosexuality, gender, abortion, and the exclusivity of Jesus as Savior. To make matters worse, many church leaders are ill-equipped to handle their flock’s doubts. Many are so consumed with meetings, programs, buildings, and budgets that equipping the saints often becomes an unfortunate afterthought.

Others are so obsessed with being relevant, hip, and marketable that they’ve failed to help their flocks navigate the truth war before us. And could it be that this fashionable-gospel movement has now created a great harvest field for apostasy to take place by replacing style over substance? And if there’s one thing Satan knows about apostasy it’s this—doubt precedes apostasy. It always does. Is the church ready to lead this culture of doubt?

Sure, the church has given its fair share of how-to messages, but has it equipped the flock how to defend their faith and how to deal with their doubts? My observation and experience tell me that the church has never been as racked with doubt as she is today. I’ve never seen such an identity crisis within the body of Christ. Never before has Jesus’s bride been so confused. And behind much of that confusion lies an irritant called doubt. No longer can pastors, teachers, apologists, and Christian leaders take the easy road and avoid answering the tough questions that plague the average Christian.

Rather, we must engage them.

Wrestle with them.

And defend against them.

Sincere believers, like you, have honest questions that deserve authentic, heartfelt answers. We cannot overlook this fact, especially with our youth, where this crisis of doubt is systemic. Lillian Kwon, in an article about doubt and college kids, writes, The more college students felt that they had the opportunity to express their doubt while they were in high school, the higher [their] levels of faith maturity and spiritual maturity.³ Isn’t that interesting? David Kinnaman, in his book You Lost Me, reinforces this cultural narrative, writing, I believe unexpressed doubt is one of the most powerful destroyers of faith. This tells us we need to talk about our doubts.

And that conversation must begin in the church. The church’s role cannot be underestimated as it relates to helping our youth face today’s doubt crisis. Church leadership teams everywhere must ask, How are we going to effectively help not only our youth, but our entire church family navigate their way through today’s doubt crisis? Unfortunately, many churches are passive in this arena. We are often far too detached, too afraid, or too unwilling to deal with people’s doubts. And that’s a tragedy, because talking about our doubts can prevent us from getting to the place where we are suffocated by our doubts.

This conversation also needs to take place in the home. Let’s face it—children need permission to doubt with Mom and Dad. Not only that, they need their parents to be vulnerable enough to share their own doubts, while also teaching their kids how they have sought to handle doubt. This relational capital in the home is paramount for kids. Parents can’t force their children to maintain a sanitized faith and stiff-arm their kids for asking thought-provoking questions. If they do, there may be a serious price to pay.

Parents must realize that their kids are going to have their doubts, so why not let them air them out on the home front? Isn’t this how it should be? This means parents need to create a safe environment for vulnerable conversations to emerge at the dinner table or wherever. It also means that Mom and Dad need to anticipate today’s biggest questions and start learning their stuff. Now is not the time to plug our ears and cover our eyes. Ignoring the battle doesn’t change the battle. It just positions us to lose the battle. So gear up. We’re at war.

Good Doubt and Bad Doubt

To be clear, not all doubt is bad. Some is good. We should doubt lots of things that aren’t true, and having a healthy skeptical attitude can save us from falling prey to a lot of dead-end philosophies. As a Christian, I’ve examined other beliefs and competing faith systems. Many of these contradict each other and, therefore, they can’t all be true. They can all be wrong, but since they contradict one another, they can’t all be true.

So I think it’s good to be skeptical and doubt Mormonism. It’s good to doubt Islam, to doubt relativism, to doubt atheism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on. It’s even good to doubt certain things within Christianity. We are not exempt from holding false beliefs. How many Christians (or denominations) do you know who contradict each other? We once believed, along with the rest of the world, that the sun revolved around the earth. It was good to depart from that misguided belief. Doubting other false systems of belief doesn’t mean they contain zero truth.⁴ It just means that the system as a whole isn’t the truth. So doubt has its place.

Thinking About Our Faith Versus Doubting Our Faith

There is also a difference between thinking about our faith and doubting our faith. Thinking about our faith is good, whereas there is a type of doubting our faith that isn’t. Doubt is a dark place, and no seeking Christian wants to live in darkness. Doubting shifts from healthy to unhealthy the moment we start doubting the truth. Famed Christian apologist William Lane Craig writes:

When I was an undergraduate at Wheaton College, an attitude was prevalent among the students that doubt was actually a virtue and that a Christian who did not doubt his faith was somehow intellectually deficient or naïve. But such an attitude is